Great Smoky Mountains

The Great Forest Returns
In the East's Largest Park

The legend has it that before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, a squirrel setting out from the Atlantic shore could make his way to the Mississippi River, 800 miles west, jumping from tree to tree without once setting foot on the ground.

That story describes as well as any the breadth and majesty of the great deciduous forest that once cloaked the eastern third of the United States. It was larger even than the broadleaf forests that had once swathed Europe and eastern China hundreds and thousands of years before, well within human memory.

The European settlers who sought to carve out farms and settlements from that great woodland did not see it with the same eyes that we do today. Where we see the translucence of dancing spring leaves, and the sculpted boles of maples, oaks and pines, they saw an endless vista of stubborn obstacles, hoarding the magnificent topsoil beneath them and blocking the way west.

As the young U.S. cleared its seaboard woodlands and extended settlements inland to the Piedmont in the south and to the base of the Appalachians further north, news of the rich river bottomlands in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys spurred a migration over the mountains and into the flat western interior. The mountains that migrants passed over were, at best, only secondary targets for agriculture. Remembering the harsh labor involved in clearing trees, most settlers passing through the Appalachians shuddered at the denseness of the forest and pressed on to easier pickings.

But some people made the mountains home. In 1818, the first white American settlers arrived at Cades Cove, a valley in the remote Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina (the region was named after the blue haze that hung over the mountains, the product of oils and esters given off by the dense hardwood and red spruce forests that thrived there). The land was part of the Cherokee domain and although the tribe used Cades Cove as a hunting ground rather than a farming area, it resisted the white incursion. Agricultural settlement there didn’t take off until the Cherokees were forced out the region by the U.S. Government’s infamous “Trail of Tears” relocation policy in 1838. Left to themselves, the white settlers at Cades Cove built a life around farming and occasional forays into the surrounding limestone mountains in search of minerals.

In the Civil War, Cades Cove, which had never used slave labor, sided with the Union. Located deep in the South, it was attacked by Confederates and never aided by the Federals. Despairing of the outside world’s trustworthiness, its 700 inhabitants withdrew into themselves after the war, becoming increasingly inbred both culturally and genetically.

The community never commercially exploited the great forests around them. Leading its insular life, cut off from commerce with the outside world, Cades Cove felled what wood it needed for replacement buildings and tools. 

But loggers finally discovered the area, and around 1900 started a 30-year-long clear-cut pillage of the forests. By the late 1920s, they had chopped down almost two-thirds of the trees that stood in the 800-square-mile stretch that would eventually become Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Logging brought cash and jobs, but it also devastated the region’s streams, fishing and wildlife. Roused by the immense destruction, a movement to assemble the logged-over areas and Cades Cove into a national preserve began picking up steam in the ‘20s. Most Cades Cove inhabitants accepted cash offers to move away, while others accepted terms that would allow them to live out their lives on their property, which would turn over to the Federal Government after their deaths.

In 1934, the U.S. dedicated Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the largest national park east of the Mississippi (with the exception of Everglades), happy to have saved a remnant of the vast forest that had preoccupied early settlers and played so big a role in American history. Even as they set aside the land to heal, the park’s protectors had not reckoned with the forest’s amazing regenerative powers. By the 1940s, it became apparent the Smoky Mountains were starting to turn wild again. The successor forests, though they didn’t yet rival the climax forests that the loggers had found in the early 1900s, were dense, thick, rich bio-systems. If it would be another 300 or 400 years before they could match their predecessors, they were still wilderness in every sense of the word.

Today, the park is the most visited in the national park system. Some 9 million people pass through it each year, almost triple the number that visit Yellowstone. The park’s features are extraordinary given its relatively small size compared to western reserves. More than 4,000 plant species thrive in the park. Its vertical range, starting at 3,000 feet and topping out at 6,643 feet at Clingman’s Dome, creates life zones that, if laid out horizontally, would span 1,200 miles south to north. There is abundant wildlife – bears, deer, foxes, birds. And as the forest has regenerated and reclaimed its water-retaining powers, the park has become a glistening wonderland, with streams, waterfalls and swimming holes seemingly everywhere.

Cades Cove itself, with its preserved houses and farm buildings, offers visitors a look at a rural past that was often hard-scrabble and lacking any romance, but also enjoyed that marvelous American penchant for rugged self-reliance coupled with a communal consciousness. Anybody looking for a place that recalls what the U.S. was like in the early 1800s will find it here.

– Patrick Totty